The Path to Enlightenment: The Life of Pentecost Barker (1690-1762)

FAIN: FT-61838-14

Matthew Kadane
Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY 14456-3301)

This project aims to unravel the process by which an ordinary person in the eighteenth century came to embrace the culture of the Enlightenment. It centers on the life of Pentecost Barker (1690-1762), a previously unknown ship's purser from Plymouth who began as a traditional religious Dissenter and ended as a radical Unitarian. His change owed, I argue, to a complicated mix of economic ambition, intellectual and spiritual curiosity, imperial encounters, and, not least, the pressures put on his traditional religiosity by his heavy drinking, itself a consequence of the sociability required to win credit for his business and class ambitions. His life, made accessible by a large diary and hundreds of letters, can also be read as culturally symptomatic of the generally complex process by which Britons abandoned tradition, embraced modernity, and then fought (for Barker in a famous and unsuccessful court case) to convince others of the merits of their new outlook.

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Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment (Article)
Title: Original Sin and the Path to the Enlightenment
Author: Matthew Kadane
Abstract: This article focuses on the unexamined and previously unknown life of Pentecost Barker (1690-1762), a British ship’s purser and wine merchant, to try, in the first instance, to explain his transition from the Puritan outlook detailed in his spiritual diary to the Enlightenment outlook detailed in a long correspondence with a unitarian minister. The motives for Barker’s change were intermingled, having as much to do with emotion, economics, drinking, and empire as with the criterion of reasonableness. The key moment of his transition, however, is conceptually more straightforward. It was his rejection of the doctrine of original sin. And in this sense Barker points to something much larger: a doctrinal shift that stands at the threshold between confessional and Enlightenment Europe. The article therefore blends social and intellectual history to try both to contextualize this watershed moment and to contribute to our understanding of why ordinary people, in particular, abandoned what to them counted as tradition and embraced the values that we now associate with Enlightenment culture.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/235/1/105/3787664?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Past and Present
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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